Tag: learning

Since I came out, I have been especially active in trying to promote National Coming Out Day in the fall, World AIDS Day on December 1, and Out and Proud festivities at colleges and universities wherever I could reach them.  The latter are usually in the Spring, since Gay Pride events usually are scheduled in the summer when activity on campus is light.

What if they gave an Out and Proud Week and nobody was?  Or maybe it’s just that nobody cared.

We arranged some programs and selected some going on around us and tried to encourage members of our campus community to attend.  There was little interest exhibited.  Not from straight folks.  Not from GLBT folks.  Actually, more straight folks showed up than gay folks…and some of the straight folks clearly hadn’t reached a positive place with regard to the issues.

And some do not understand that issues is plural.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to have done worse in school.  If I had had some of my work rejected, maybe it wouldn’t have affected me the way it has as an adult.

But it never was rejected, all the way through college.  Whenever I tried, I did well.  Flunking out of Penn wasn’t the result of not doing good work.  It was the result of not working because I had already given up…on life.

So anyway, as I mentioned in Friday’s MitM, my birthday was followed the next day by a rejection form letter from Calyx press.  That was a downer.  They didn’t apparently think any of my six poems were suitable for their Journal.  They assured me it wasn’t just one person who thought so, but at least two readers thought they were not worthy.

That made me feel better, do you think?

The time has almost come.  By next week it will have passed.

While I should be performing other tasks and thinking about other things, my mind keeps wandering back to the fact that I was born 60 years ago on Thursday.  The number addict in me observes that 60 = 2² * 3 * 5 is a special number.  But we all knew that, didn’t we?

Sixty minutes in an hour, so a minute is minute (small).  And a second is called a second because it is 1/60² part of an hour…second power.  Magic number…as is 360 (=  2³ * 3² * 5) …perhaps because it can be divided so well into equal pieces in so many ways.  Anyway, the Sumerians thought a sexagesimal system was cool…and that gave us our timekeeping strategy and the way we measure angles.  Who knew…until much later, that 60 was also the number of elements in the smallest non-abelian simple group?

One could go back further than the Sumerians and discover that the Chinese use a calendar with a cycle of sixty years…the Jia-Zi system.  

each year within the 60-year cycle being named with two symbols, the first being base-10 (called Tian-Gan, ??  or heavenly stems) and the second symbol being base 12 (called Di-Zhi, ??  or earthly branches).

60 is the least common multiple of 12 and 10, of course.

Magic numbers are scarce, until you actively look for them.  Then you discover that all integers are magic.  

Proof: Let x be the smallest non-magic positive number. If x exists, x would be special…and so x would be magic from some perspective or other. If no such x exists, then all postive integers are magic by induction.

Sort of.  Not a real proof, of course.  The term “magic number” has not been defined here…as I purposely intended.

But I digress…

If I have seemed preoccupied the last week or so, that has been because I had homework that required doing.  I mean, I got to choose whether or not to do the assignment, but it was still homework.  A student at the University of Central Arkansas asked if she could interview me via email as background for a paper she’s writing.  She’s an Honors College student there.

Anyway, answering the ten questions she sent me became a task.   I have completed that task and sent her my answers.  

But it was a bit more emotionally taxing than I expected it to be, so I have decided to share it here as well.

Pain shared is lessened.  Joy shared is increased.

It is also possibly the case that some of this is news to some of the membership here at Docudharma.  One never knows.  If you’ve not heard it before, it’s new to you.

What follows is what I sent her, with some html formatting added.

It was the fall quarter of 1974 at Portland State University.  I had transferred to PSU after three quarters at the Sylvania campus of Portland Community College.  I was enrolled in a class called Introduction to Algebraic Structures, along with Advanced Calculus, German, Differential Equations, Vector Analysis…and a class I can’t recall.  But this is a story about Algebraic Structures.

The class was taught by Marjorie Enneking.  It was in that class that a doorway opened, a doorway into a deeper meaning in life.  At the time, it was a doorway to the deeper meanings of mathematics.  Same thing.

Marjorie generated the thought (or maybe it was spontaneously generated) that mathematics was about words.  Up to that point I had foolishly been concentrating on the numbers.  The trees had been concealing the forest.  I had been focusing on How, when the real meat of mathematics was in the Why.

Once upon a time I took an idea from real life and tried to implement it online.

It seemed easy enough.  Provide a place for people to talk about education, teaching and learning.  To encourage discussion, provide an essay.  To provide a service, provide some links.  

It succeeded in some ways, but it also strayed away from what it’s intention was.  Naming it Teacher’s Lounge was probably the mistake.  I’m not very creative when it comes to titles.  That title apparently conveyed the impression that people who weren’t teachers weren’t welcome.  As if I have an exclusionary bone in my body.

Whatever the reason, people who weren’t teachers mostly stayed away…or apologized for not doing so.  I think that says a lot about the state of education at the present:  people actually apologize for being interested in it.

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos

Habit took over again on Thursday.

For no apparent reason other than it has been done for the past 120 weeks in a row, I started preparing another Teacher’s Lounge.  I started gathering links.  Unlike most weeks, however, I read few of the diaries at those links beyond the point of determining their subject matter.  I suppose that means some of them may be misplaced.  Truth is that my threshold of caring has drastically diminished.

And that’s not a good state of mind to be in.  It is not conducive to a job well done.

Here we are, in the midst of what I have always considered to be the worst part of a Spring semester.  January and the start up has gone by the wayside and Spring Break doesn’t arrive until March.  In between we have the long hard slog towards midterm exams.

It is also the time in which that “extra” stuff gets emphasized.  “Oh, by the way…” starts piling up work for next semester.  “If you are not too busy…” add to it.

I get to be the center attraction in a Women’s Studies class discussion on gender in the next couple of weeks.  Once more into the cage, Dr. LabRat.  Maybe we can have a fruitful discussion about the meaning of the phrases “real women” and “real men.”  But I’m only the specimen, so that’s probably unlikely.

More beyond…

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos

On Thursday night students, faculty and staff at Bloomfield College gathered for a discussion of the issues and the candidates in the current campaign.  I have to admit I missed it.  I was in the midst of becoming rather ill and in need of horizontal collapse.

I do have to admit that Edwards and Giulliani dropping out on Wednesday ticked off the students who were preparing the event for Thursday.  Students always hate it when work they’ve done becomes irrelevant.  But at least those students were able to participate in the issues discussion.

This event and other events are the brainchildren of a collaboration between the political science, history disciplines and women’s studies disciplines and Student Government.  The candidate event kicks off Black History month for us.

What if they had a special week and nobody noticed?

Last week was No Name-Calling Week.  From all appearances, at least on the level of the blogs, there wasn’t much notice.  Name-calling is de rigeur.

Which raises a good question.  If adults demand their right to call people names as part of what they think is intelligent debate, why would we expect the children to behave any differently.

It would probably be prudent of me not to mention that fact.  I’ve never been accused of being prudent.

I think about the children.  Big surprise.  I’m a teacher.

Thursday was first day of classes, Day #2.  School actually started on Wednesday, but of course we only met the students and teachers in our classes that meet on Wednesdays.

So I walked into my morning class…Computer Literacy at 10 am…and watched as my students slowly arrived, making myself useful by passing our syllabi.

I was not expecting anything out of the ordinary…such as, for example, all the students to show up on that first day of class.  I was hoping for something bigger than 50%.  In fact, ever single student registered for the class was in class and seated by 10:05.

The students helped me up from where I had fainted from surprise (no, not really).  Then one of them called me over to her computer station and informed me of a problem.  “I am visually impaired,”  she said.  “So am I,” I said.  “What can I do to help?”

There is no one thing I can say I like about working in higher education.  The sense of accomplishment I feel when a student succeeds at learning can be as exhilarating as any drug I know.  I would hope it would only be surpassed by the feeling a student has in learning the material.

The knowledge that I am doing something worthwhile in this world, something that, I hope and choose to believe, can only improve the lives of those I teach, for the benefit of the world at large is why I became a teacher in the first place.

But right up there towards the top of the list is the fact that every year provides two or three opportunities for me and my students to have a fresh start.  Last semester and last year is in the past and it is time to start anew.